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Barry Whyte is a 'Master Inventor' working in the Systems Group. Now based in Auckland New Zealand, Barry is working for the IBM ATS team covering Storage Virtualization for the AP region. Previously Barry was based in IBM Hursley, UK. Barry primarly works on the IBM SAN Volume Controller and Storwize family of virtual disk systems. Barry graduated from The University of Glasgow in 1996 with a B.Sc (Hons) in Computing Science. In his 18 years at IBM he has also worked on the successful Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and the IBM DS8000 range. Barry joined the SVC development team soon after its inception and has held many positions before taking on his long running role as performance architect. In 2015 Barry moved to New Zealand, but maintains a part-time working role for the Hursley team working as a performance consultant. Outside of work, Barry enjoys playing golf and all things to do with Rotary Engines. All posts on this blog are (c) Copyright International Business Machines 2014 - reproduction without prior approval is prohibited.

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A few days late with my welcome, I'm sure when the clocks went forward a couple of weeks ago someone also stole one day from every week, it feels like that at the moment - just not enough hours to get everything done at work and at home - maybe I should stop playing with Callum and his Lego so... [Continue Reading]

Funny, I had been thinking about blogging about a customer visit I had this week, primarily a new SVC user wanting to discuss and go into some deeper technical insight into the product. I enjoy these days as its a chance to talk techy with someone who is actually using and hopefully benefiting from... [Continue Reading]

How well are you handling the information explosion? Can your storage infrastructure handle the next growth phase? Success in today's business climate will require a dynamic information infrastructure that is highly available, responsive, efficient and cost effective. In this webcast, hear how... [Continue Reading]

A work colleague asked if is RSS feed for my blog was broken the other day. Things have been sure crazy for the last few weeks - thats always my excuse! I did have this post in the sidelines, and wanted the mud slinging to stop before I set the record straight. Well, you can probably guess who's... [Continue Reading]

Following last Septembers "Information Infrastructure" launch, IBM today announced wave two subtitled Dynamic Infrastructure . The press release covers some of the higher level details, and a new "DI" portal has been created on the IBM website. From a disk and storage perspective the DS8000 gets... [Continue Reading]

While following the twitterings of the storage community, Ian pointed us to the IBM Research page Wordle . This is one of the growing online applications that can data-mine on Web 2.0 sites. All this needs is an RSS feed or even a cut and paste of some text. So here is the Wordle map of my blog :... [Continue Reading]

Just a quick one to point you to the latest attempt from Chuck Hollis to spread more FUD about Storage Virtualization and why he wishes it would go away. I can tell you why he wants it to go away, and its nothing to do with the arguments he lays out... There is some interesting discussion in the... [Continue Reading]

Seriously, where has January gone? OK, so we have a couple of days left, but it seems only yesterday I was feeling relaxed and rested after a nice couple of weeks off over the festive season... then wham... We are deep in the middle of a major development phase, things are coming together that have... [Continue Reading]

It seems a common thread in technology blogs to post some predictions for the coming year. However, as I'm not an analyst and don't profess to understand the entire storage industry, I thought I'd keep to a brief history of 2008 as I saw it - obviously with an IBM and SVC slant on things. This isn't... [Continue Reading]

In the final part of my 'How it Works' series I'm looking at upgrades. Both software and hardware. Maintenance Windows As the world has moved to a 24x7x52 culture, nobody can really afford many, if any, 'maintenance windows' these days. I described in part2 that to move from a non-virtual to a... [Continue Reading]

In part 1 of this series I covered the terminology of SVC. Part 2 showed how you would introduce existing volumes into a virtualized environment using SVC. In part 3 I cover the 'now what'... Making the most of it Once you have imported the data, you now have a set of disks that are simply running... [Continue Reading]

Quick interrupt to my partwork. The SVC Entry Edition and 4.3.1 code base is now available for download from the usual SVC download page . As usual, this is a no cost upgrade, and provides support for all existing SVC hardware, 4F2, 8F2, 8F4 and 8G4, not to mention the new EE SVC node hardware. The... [Continue Reading]

In part2 of this "HiW" - How it Works - discussion of SVC, I look at how you can take an existing SAN infrastructure and Virtualize it. Import your Data Its likely that today you have a SAN of some kind. It maybe a couple of 32 port switches, or it maybe a pair (or more) of enterprise class... [Continue Reading]

I thought it was time to get back to some technical content, and with recent blog posts, it clear that there is some confusion over how SVC works. In particular how the actual virtual to physical blocks are mapped, how they can be changed without application disruption, and how you get data into... [Continue Reading]

I've posted a long reply to clarify a few things over on the Anarchists post , which is a master piece of missing the point, mis-directions and mis-interpretations, purely aimed at trying to inject further FUD into accepted benchmarks performed by the Storage Performance Council . Lets start with... [Continue Reading]